


The Old Plumage

by GretchenSinister



Category: Rise of the Guardians (2012)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-10
Updated: 2019-05-10
Packaged: 2020-02-29 06:57:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 756
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18773578
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GretchenSinister/pseuds/GretchenSinister
Summary: Original Prompt: "I rewatched The Hogfather with my family this Christmas!For those of you who don’t know it, the basic setup is the same as RotG: someone wants to destroy all belief in the universe (in this case The Hogfather, an analogue for Santa), and they start by breaking into the Tooth Fairy’s castle and stealing the teeth.But, this being Terry Pratchett, there are some twists thrown in. And one is that the Tooth Fairy? Started out life as the Boogeyman. Who realized that there were more terrifying things out there than shadows under the bed, and decided to start stealing teeth in order to safeguard the children.Basically, I want either Tooth being sympathetic to Pitch because she started out in the same place and wants him to have the same revelation, or Pitch realizes that he’s frightening children for their own good and asks Tooth to help him learn how to safeguard the children.Bonus points if Pitch and Tooth are Good, but not Nice."Oh good golly! I haven’t read or watched The Hogfather, so I just wrote this as Tooth defending her palace from Pitch’s attack, while having the history of being a kind of boogeyman figure herself.





	The Old Plumage

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted on Tumblr on 8/17/2015.

Tooth knew that she should call the other Guardians. That was one of the advantages of  _being_  a Guardian, wasn’t it? That one no longer had to face everything alone. It was one of the things that had been most strange, most joyous, when she became a Guardian herself.  
  
She had asked the Guardians for help before—that had been part of her own coming to Guardianhood. It wasn’t as if she couldn’t, and yet, as her wings and swords sliced through nightmare after nightmare, as her fairies fought and were swallowed by the terrible sand horses, as tendrils of black sand gathered shining tooth boxes faster than she could cut them away, the thought never fully formed in her mind, and so never went out to any of her fairies, and never went back to the Guardians at the Pole, who were no doubt still working out how to persuade Jack Frost to join them. By the time she realized she really couldn’t defend her palace on her own, there were no fairies to send, and she refused to surrender by leaving the palace to be gutted.  
  
Perhaps it was simple stubbornness. Perhaps it was pride. Perhaps, though—perhaps it was simply that she was having so much  _fun_  defending her palace with such abandon, even if it was a lost cause, even if the numbers of the nightmares never really diminished. Perhaps it was that she didn’t want the Guardians to hear her laugh when she made a particularly good kill, when she found herself able to keep attacking, slashing, stabbing, till she was all but covered with black dust. She was afraid it would remind them of the days before she became a Guardian, when her energies hadn’t been directed in the same direction as theirs. She very much wished to avoid calling to their minds the fears she had found and used in the teeth before she had really had a chance to think about what she was doing and why she was doing it.  
  
These thoughts, she did let form, and in spite of leading four nightmares in a dizzying chase through the balconies of her palace, she distinctly heard a human—or close-to-human—voice exclaim in surprise, somewhere far below her. So! Pitch Black was responsible for this, despite the new sand and nightmares.  
  
She had just enough time to reach this conclusion and decide to seek out the boogeyman directly when the nightmares stopped their chase and wheeled away. The sand that had been taking the tooth boxes withdrew as well, and only moments later, Tooth’s palace was empty, quieter and stiller than it had been for centuries.   
  
She wanted to collapse in that quiet; if she wasn’t doing something she felt all too strongly where her fairies weren’t, her mind going back again and again to that place like…well, a tongue pressing against the space that had held a now-missing tooth.  
  
And still, she did not want to go to the Guardians just yet. Pitch Black was the culprit, and he was…not the worst being they could face, even if he was amazingly infuriating in the way he never really listened or stopped to think, though this habit had caused his near-destruction several times. Pitch wasn’t easy to get along with, but it wasn’t because he was the Boogeyman. Tooth didn’t want to be the one to explain that, though Jack might understand, and Sandy, too, might come around quickly, if her intuition was right.  
  
But she didn’t have time for that, even if she had had the inclination. Pitch Black, from the timing of his exclamation of surprise, knew something about her that he hadn’t known before. She wanted to see if she could use that, and it would only be a little while before enough children found their teeth hadn’t been collected and she would begin losing the power given to her by belief. It would be hard to follow him then, and still harder to fight.  
  
She dived down into her pool and washed the black sand off in a rush. Pitch had never been willing to listen to all the Guardians at once, but perhaps…perhaps he might listen to one. Tooth fluffed her feathers in the sunlight, and gave their colorful shine a wistful look. When she smoothed them out again, they were inky black, and she was ready to go tell the boogeyman more things he didn’t know, ask him a few questions—and hopefully lead him to question himself.


End file.
